This original novel deftly explores the mind of a domesticated ape, says Anthony
Cummins.

Colin McAdam’sthird novel begins in the Seventies, with a Vermont couple, Walt and Judy, who want a child but can’t conceive. When Walt reads a magazine feature on apes and sign language, it plants a seed in his head, and after some backdoor enquiries — and $6,000 — he becomes the proud owner of Looee, an orphaned chimp from Sierra Leone, who gets shuttled between unscrupulous hands for ever larger bundles of cash.

His wife embraces without hesitation the idea that Looee will be their son. At first, Walt and Judy’s experience differs from that of any other new parents only in degree, with worries about diarrhoea, high temperatures and household safety. But, unsurprisingly, not everyone accepts them as a family — tradesmen howl in unkind mirth when they see the chimp in a jacket and braces — and perhaps there’ll be readers, too, who are sceptical of McAdam’s ability to adopt Looee as a character.

Any doubts are put to rest early on when, raiding a neighbour’s kitchen at midnight, Looee tucks into pickles tasting “like the bitter insides of Walt and Judy’s ears”. Not only does the detail persuade you that McAdam’s imagination has the necessary reach, it evokes, with deft economy, the domestic intimacy — or chaos — that Looee brings to their lives.

Even more impressive is the way that the novel’s style colours our view of the primate mind. The punctuation is sparing; for example, the third paragraph reads: “On various nights in various ways Judy said do I feel old Walter, and he said you’re too young to be old. Come here.” It isn’t always easy to follow, but the payoff is the rich confusion that this desegregated prose generates; for example, in a statement such as “he liked to leave a small mess around the edges of the floor for mummy to clean” — does the thought belong to Looee, or “mummy”?

An intercut thread follows a Florida language researcher, David, seeking to disturb the dogma that humans are a unique species with a series of carrot-and-stick experiments in which chimps prod symbols on a keypad to request treats including vodka, cigarettes and Pac-Man. McAdam borrows vocabulary from Hungarian, Turkish and Polish to describe David’s chimps as they groom, fight and mate. A typical line runs: “Jonathan is looming, stubborn black cloud, bedoulerek radish pointing hot and urgent from under his belly”.

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Like Walt and Judy, David becomes a pariah — the editors of Science reject his work as an “over-interpretation of stimulus and response”, a possibility kept in play by McAdam’s use of dramatic irony.

A Beautiful Truth doesn’t have a driving narrative: its energy comes mainly from the thought it puts into the texture of Walt and Judy’s home set-up. Walt’s quietly rivalrous business partner Mike, who lusts after Judy, is a red herring, although his designs on state politics give him a helping hand in twining the threads when — in the novel’s pivotal moment — Looee commits a random act of GBH. McAdam doesn’t downplay the carnage, but we still pity Looee as he becomes a specimen in experiments driven not by interest in language development but by the emergence of Aids.

This is a serious, thoughtful piece of work. Whether or not you believe, at the end, that Looee is haunted by the memory of his violence — I’m not sure I do — it’s a question that turns less on McAdam’s skill than on the theme of the novel itself. And its painful descriptions of medical research complicate the common-sense view that animal testing spares human suffering — for the unlucky humans tasked with administering the procedures here, they’re correlates, not opposites.